The mad Nazi playwright in The Producers, Franz Liebkind, made his feelings about Winston Churchill perfectly clear, scorning “his cigars, his brandy, and his rotten, rotten paintings. Now Hitler, there was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment: two coats, one afternoon!”

Joking aside, though, Churchill surpassed the Fuhrer in art just as he did in war. As a young man, the latter twice failed his admission test to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and eked out a living with iffy watercolour copies of Viennese postcards.

The Englishman, by contrast, was in 1948 appointed Honorary Academician Extraordinary by the Royal Academyfor “achievements in the art of painting”. A solo show in its Diploma Galleries followed in 1959, around the same time that Tate acquired for the nation his landscape The Loup River in the Alpes Maritimes.

To some extent, of course, this is a case of art history being written by the victors. Allied success in the Second World War meant it was Churchill’s geopolitical vision that won out over Hitler’s and, as a consequence, his artistic vision did too. Churchill himself was under no illusions about the quality of his works, referring to them as “little daubs”.

He first turned to painting aged 40, after resigning as First Lord of the Admiralty following the Dardanelles debacle of 1915. Profoundly depressed, he quit London and rented a farm in Godalming for the summer with wife Clementine. Among their many visitors was Winston’s sister-in-law Gwendoline, a keen watercolourist who encouraged him to pick up a paintbrush for the first time.

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“Painting came to my rescue in a most trying time,” Churchill recalled later. “I had long hours of unwonted leisure, in which to contemplate the frightful unfolding of War; and then the Muse of Painting came to me and said, 'Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people’.”

His depression is marked in one of Churchill’s first images, View Of Cherkley, painted for his friend Lord Beaverbrook from the terrace of the latter’s country home. The lush, green vista towards a sunny horizon is largely blotted out by the dark, foreboding presence of two towering conifer trees in the foreground.

Soon, though, things start to look up. The self-taught Churchill painted some 500 works in total – all of which are reproduced in an impressive new coffee-table book. The majority were bright, warm landscapes, with obvious debt to the French impressionists. (For its broken, watery reflections, The Harbour at Cannes has even been compared to Monet, albeit on an off day.) The canvases are testament to the joy and emotional relief that the act of painting brought him.

Churchill revealed in an essay for Strand magazine in 1921, Painting as a Pastime, “I don’t presume to explain how to paint, only how to get enjoyment,” adding that amateurs such as he “cannot aspire to masterpieces [but] content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box”. He continued to paint for the rest of his life, most productively, and cathartically, in periods of distress – such as the Thirties, when Churchill found himself in the wilderness politically and in the soup financially, after losing a fortune in stocks in the Wall Street Crash.

So just how good was Churchill’s art? In truth, it’s perfectly decent. His friendship with Walter Sickert doesn’t appear to have had an obvious influence. That artist’s low tones and grimy subjects find no place in Churchill’s oeuvre, which, particularly in his many fine paintings of Morocco, reach an Expressionistic intensity of colour.

In 1943’s Marrakech (his only canvas of World War Two, painted on a break from the Casablanca Conference), the red of the city’s clay walls and brownish ochre of the desert sands are offset by the blue of the clear skies and white of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains.

The truth is, however, that we wouldn’t still be being talking about these works if they hadn’t been painted by Winston Churchill. And they make for a curious viewing experience. One approaches them in a very different way from most paintings. Which is to say, one’s usual response to an art-work is to wonder who created it, seeking out biographical information to perhaps provide insight as to how such artistic heights were reached. With Churchill, though, it’s the other way around: we already know who he was and look to his art-work to perhaps provide insight as to how such biographic heights were reached.

We seek a sneaky, subjective take on how this great man saw the world: the world that became ours, the world we now inhabit. (Though the cynic might argue Churchill’s world was hardly inclusive: from Monaco and Lake Como to Knebworth House and Hever Castle, one rather loses track of the exotic locations and friends’ stately homes he painted.)

As a sign of growing confidence in his art, after the war Churchill took to giving away his canvases as presents. One grateful recipient was President Eisenhower, who in 1958 organised a tour of Churchill’s paintings across America. At the opening in Kansas City, Harry S. Truman – in an unveiled dig at the Abstract Expressionists – pronounced the pictures “damn good. At least, you can tell what they’re of: which is more than can be said for most modern painting”.

Of Churchill’s endeavours beyond politics, it’s his writing (“The Second World War” series, especially) that’s most famous – but his painting remains of great interest, too. For one thing, how many painters can you think of who’d have made it as decent prime ministers?